We have an analysis routine for proteomics data written for IgorPro. One output is a volcano plot. These plots show the fold change in one sample compared to another and plot that against a p-value to estimate how reproducible any changes observed are. This post is not about that software, ...

I’ve posted in the past about analysing race results in R (most recently here). I ran the 2023 MK Marathon and wanted to have a look at the finishing times. The days of race results being made available as a csv or xls for easy analysis seem to be behind ...

I’m not a big movie person. Nonetheless I have a media library with quite a few films in and I wondered how many “films to see before you die”-type movies I had in the collection, and how many were missing. I used R to find the answers. I’...

2022 was my best year for running to date. In 2021, my goal was to run 2021 km. For 2022, I wanted to see if I could run 2500 km and also to run 50 HM-or-more distance runs. I managed both and ended the year on a total of 2734 km. I also bagged two […]

Another post looking at Twitter data in R. It follows this one and this one. I wanted to look again at my tweeting frequency over the 12 years on Twitter, but this time do it in a calendar view. Something like a GitHub commit calendar would be perfect. I have used ...

Please consider this a “supplementary analysis” to my previous post looking at the frequency of tweets from my personal account over the last 12 years. I was curious about what times I was active on Twitter (measured by when I tweeted). Others might be interested in a solution to look at ...

At the time of writing, I have essentially left Twitter. It was a fun ride and without going into what’s happening there now, this is a good opportunity to look at my 12 years on the platform. Early in November, I downloaded my data and locked my Twitter account. This ...

There are lots of ways for runners and cyclists to analyse training data. A key question most fitness enthusiasts want to know is “how am I doing?”. “How you are doing” is referred to as form. Unsurprisingly, form can be estimated in many ways. One method is using training stress ...

By 30th September 2022, I had clocked up a total of over 2000 km of running in 2022. This milestone was a good opportunity to look at how I got to this point. The code is shown below. First, we can make a histogram to look at the distance of runs. From this ...

It’s been a while since I posted a breakdown of half marathon times. The last time seems to have been 2018. I decided to give my old code a clean-up and quickly crunched the numbers from the 2022 Kenilworth Half Marathon. First, the results: Briefly, the code below reads in a ...

I recently made my first R package and was asked how I did it. The answer of course was: I searched, read, and stumbled around until it was done. But having gone through the process I figured it was worthwhile summarising what I did and what I found tricky. First ...

A quick post about a puzzle called Wordle that is currently taking over the internet. It’s a mastermind-like game where the object is to guess an unknown 5-letter word. Puzzlers are encouraged to share their results after completing a puzzle. Here is an example for puzzle 192. So how do ...

As 2021 draws to a close, it’s time to check back in on a previous post. As a recap, Garmin Connect offered four challenges to run 3 x 505 km and 1 x 505 km, one in each of the four quarters of 2021. Completing all four would mean running 2021 km in 2021. I […]

The aim of this post is to look at revisions of bioRxiv preprints. I’m interested how long preprint versions exist on bioRxiv. In other words: how long do revisions to preprints take? The data from bioRxiv is a complex dataset with many caveats as I’ll explain further down, ...

This post is an update of a previous analysis on quantixed. We have covered publication lag times – the time it takes for a paper go from submitted (received) to accepted and published – a lot on here. It is possible to look at lag times, in R using data from PubMed. ...

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, different countries are experiencing various restrictions including lockdowns. Some of these restrictions alter our ability to do science: by hindering lab access or taking time away from researchers for homeschooling. So, what impact has the pandemic had on scientific output? One way to look at ...

The scientific response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been astounding. Aside from efforts to generate vaccines, the genomic surveillance of the virus has been truly remarkable. For example, the nextstrain project has sequence many SARS-CoV-2 genomes. In fact, the rapid identification of multiple new strains and mutations by diverse groups ...